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Vancouver wants single-family neighbourhoods to ‘make room’ for more people

VANCOUVER—Duplexes everywhere. Taller laneway houses. More townhouses, and apartment buildings up to four storeys. The possibility that basement suite doors could open on to front yards.

Vancouver city staff will be proposing these changes, meant to push density into the city’s single-family home neighbourhoods, to city council on June 19 as part of a strategy to increase the overall numbers of affordable homes built in the city over the next 10 years.

Staff have named the strategy “Making Room.” It’s part of an overall housing plan, adopted six months ago, intended to target new home supply to a range of incomes. That’s a departure from letting the market dictate what developers build and who they sell it to.

“We found in our investigation that much of the new supply generated in Vancouver since 2010 or 2012 has been very high end, and it’s really more of a result of investment of foreign and domestic capital,” Gil Kelley, the city’s chief planner, told reporters in a June 13 technical briefing.

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As well as the changes to single-family zoning, city staff are also planning to consolidate social housing initiatives into a $2-billion endowment fund, which would include revenue from Vancouver’s empty homes tax and developer fees as well as contributions from the provincial and federal government. That consolidated fund will be used to build the 12,000 units of social and supportive housing units the city wants to build over the next 10 years.

Those 12,000 units are part of an overall mix of 72,000 new housing units city planners have determined are needed to meet demand over the next decade. The city wants 20,000 of that total to be rental apartments; 30,000 to be condos; 4,000 to be rental laneway houses; 1,000 to be stratified coach houses; and 5,000 to be townhouses.

Based on the new housing targets, the city exceeded the number of social- and supporting-housing units approved in 2017, and the number of market condo units and rental laneway houses. But the city fell short on the number of purpose-built rental units: the new plan calls for 2,000 new rental units to be approved every year, and the city approved just 822 in 2017.

In fact, Vancouver has created just over 2,400 rental apartments over the past seven years, according to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation data — meaning the city will have to dramatically up the pace of rental development to meet its new targets.

When it comes to densifying Vancouver’s single-family neighbourhoods, where homes are now universally valued at well over $1 million and out of reach of most local-income earners, city planners say they hope rental-only zoning and affordable home ownership covenants can be used to dampen the real estate speculation that could put new housing out of reach.

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“We hear … that the city has way too much land area locked up in low-density zoning, and that needs to change in order to make room for people of different incomes,” said Dan Garrison, a senior planner.

“That we focus too much of our affordable housing on arterial streets, and have retained too much of that land area in those nice, leafy neighbourhoods that’s largely only available to people with higher incomes.”

Jen St. Denis is a Vancouver-based reporter covering affordability and city hall. Follow her on Twitter: @jenstden

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